Saturday, July 21, 2012

What James Holmes and the Colorado Movie Massacre Tell Us About White (Male) Privilege

The Colorado "Batman Movie" Shooting Massacre will generate many narratives among the public and media. This tragedy will be one more opportunity to reflect on the United States' gun laws. The relationship between popular culture and violence will be a hot topic as well. Others will focus on questions surrounding access to mental healthcare, and what if anything could have been done to prevent James Holmes from committing his murder rampage during the debut of The Dark Knight Rises.

However, there are several conversations that will likely not occur. It is unlikely that the aftermath of the Colorado shooting rampage will be a moment when we as a country reflect upon the relationship between masculinity and violence. There most certainly will not be a "beer summit" about how accused shooter James Holmes is one more entry in a long list of mass killers who are white, male, and young.

When viewed through the white racial frame, there is nothing in his deeds on last Friday night that reflects upon the behavior of white people, generally, or white men in particular. From this perspective, his dressing up as The Joker, and killing more than a dozen people, and wounding many more, are the actions of one sick person.

July 12, 1976: Edward Charles Allaway, a custodian in the library of California State University, Fullerton, fatally shot seven fellow employees and wounded two others.

Aug. 20, 1986: Pat Sherrill, 44, a postal worker who was about to be fired, shoots 14 people at a post office in Edmond, Okla. He then kills himself.

July 18, 1984: James Oliver Huberty, an out-of-work security guard, kills 21 people in a McDonald's restaurant in San Ysidro, Calif. A police sharpshooter kills Huberty.

Aug. 1, 1966: Charles Whitman opened fire from the clock tower at the University of Texas at Austin, killing 16 people and wounding 31.

Oct. 16, 1991: A deadly shooting rampage took place in Killeen, Texas, as George Hennard opened fire at a Luby's Cafeteria, killing 23 people before taking his own life. 20 others were wounded in the attack.

April 20, 1999: Students Eric Harris, 18, and Dylan Klebold, 17, opened fire at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., killing 12 classmates and a teacher and wounding 26 others before killing themselves in the school's library.

March 10, 2009: Michael McLendon, 28, killed 10 people – including his mother, four other relatives, and the wife and child of a local sheriff's deputy – across two rural Alabama counties. He then killed himself.

The freedom to kill, maim, commit wanton acts of violence, and to be anti-social (as well as pathological) without having your actions reflect on your own racial group, is one of the ultimate, if not in fact most potent, examples of White Privilege in post civil rights era America. Instead of a national conversation where we reflect on what has gone wrong with young white men in our society--a group which apparently possesses a high propensity for committing acts of mass violence--James Holmes will be framed as an outlier.

That is a mighty comfort to have--all of one's deficiencies are ignored as those of an individual; all of one's abilities and gifts are taken as positive attributes and credits to one's race.

As comedian Louis CK has joked, it sure as hell is good to be white and male in America! If given a choice to re-up every year, who the hell wouldn't sign up to be white again?

In America, folks often ask, "what the hell is wrong with black people?" In the aftermath of the Colorado Movie Massacre, Columbine, and many other incidents, we need to ask, "what the hell is wrong with young white men?

Sadly, that question will not be asked on a national stage. White privilege is blinding. In the case of James Holmes, it also mutes a much needed national conversation about the ties between (white) masculinity and violence.

49 comments:

OTB
said...

What if we extend the question a bit on masculinity and violence -- beyond just white males? While the lone attackers (with guns) assaulting large groups of victims tend to be white, what about the large groups of attackers assaulting small groups of victims? Do those also tend to be white -- or is there yet another dynamic at play here?

'The freedom to kill, maim, commit wanton acts of violence, and to be anti-social (as well as pathological) without having your actions reflect on your own racial group, is one of the ultimate, if not in fact most potent, examples of White Privilege in post civil rights era America.'

Nice to see you recognize this. Criminality and depravity are not racially determined, as some of your recent posts seem to suggest.

In the meantime, here is something about The Dark Night Dawning that I didn't know. Can anybody verify?

"Recently a white man went into a midnight movie premiere in *a black neighborhood* in Aurora Colorado shooting 70 people killing 12"

And this is curious:"This theater had so many problems from black gangs at midnight premiere that the Aurora city police had at least 4 to 8 city cops at every premiere. But at this premiere there were no city cops. Why?"

There is a group being singled out, but it is not racial in nature. James Eagan Holmes is yet another example of "quiet, kind of a loner". Guys like me, unmarried, no large circle of friends, we are the suspects when these things happen.

I was thinking about this within the context of the conversation about the sociopathy of Mitt Romney versus that of Barack Obama. Bro. CNu hit it a grand slam with this comment: "Your boy the Hon.Bro.Preznit.Double-O is an infinitely more highly evolved apex predator sociopath."

Indeed as the POTUS meets with families of the victims in Colorado what can an assassin say about a mass-murderer?

It’s likely to get much worse in crimogenic America as these lone wolves and other terrorists perfect their use of technology.

Matty Boy: It's a little disingenuous to say that people like you and I (white male loner types) are the "suspects" in cases like this. People like you and I are the perpetrators of many acts such as these, but we are not "suspected." The police do not break down our doors in the aftermath or in anticipation of such events. More often than not because the perpetrator has committed suicide at the scene or shortly after.

What we are seeing here, and something that will be difficult to resolve on a comments thread on a race blog, is a psychological effect of the catch-22 that many white men who, within the privileged group that their race and gender makes them eligible for, find themselves on the lower rungs of the ladder. Whether economically (poor, unemployed, dead-end job), socially (anti-social, introverted) or whatever else. These people are subject to the conflicting pulls of "You have the power and ability to be a great and influential person" (i.e. you are white and male) and that therefore their social anxiety, lack of income, or whatever else constitutes a personal failure to live up to the standards of the privileged oppressor. The psychological torque of this seems to occasionally prompt white men to gun down a bunch of civilians in cold blood. Don't understand why that would be, but it does seem to be a common reaction, a sort of whine: "I'm white and male, why isn't my life better? Why am I not respected, nay revered, as is my right? I'll show them, I'll show them with all these guns I am legally allowed to own because this is the US."

(2) White male mass killers intends to get caught and make themselves famous whereas black male mass killers just want to show the other black males killers they are tough.

There are more black male mass killers than white ones. Because there are more black gang members than crazy white loons who shoot up a school or theatre. Black mass killings happend every damn day in California and in Chicago....white ones only once every few years. Duh.

I'd say what you have here is spoiled brat syndrome. You and me -- although one is white and one black -- were both whipped by our parents when we were kids I'm sure. We got the belt taken to us when we did wrong. This guy undoubtedly did not. Its not white or black -- this is something both white and black can agree on -- its discipline of children. This was one of those entitled little punks who never had a spanking in his life, and as a result grew up with no care for anyone else...he was given everything he wanted and was never made to respect others. Dr. Spock has go to go!

Why were all the keynote speakers at the televised vigil black, when all the victims were white? Is Billy Graham Jr. not welcomed anymore. Is white America depleted of intelligence, literacy and the ability to organize and take care of its own? Are the 12.7% of the country that is statistically black now firmly in charge of the moral terpitude of the nation and obviously put in positions of moral character? How the pendulum swings. I assume it will find the correct balance again when it swings back, hopefully next year.

black people have been in charge of the moral terpitude and moral character of this country for centuries. Though I am still waiting for members and leaders of the white community to take some courage to make a statement denouncing the actions of this white man. Why can't we get some reporters going into white communities demanding that they speak out against this white man and separate themselves from his likeness. I wonder why he did it. I think young white men just hate america and hate freedom. I hope police pull every young white man over they see that looks anything like this suspicious white guy. We have to get to the bottom of this and protect our communities from crazy young white men like this. We need to look with suspicion and a presumed guilt towards all havens of young white men. Starbucks is a good place to start, lets shake that shit down. I bet if we look up his financial records that white kid bought a starbucks recently. His type swarms that place.

Empirical evidence indicates that the killer apes remain in the (by a very large measure) minority of the population, no? How many murders have you seen today? How many in front of your house? How many *in* your house or next door? America is too violent to be considered truly civilized, but not violent enough to be described as being populated by killer apes. Killer apes don't run libraries, recording studios, pet shops, bakeries, planetariums, book stores, hospitals, et al.

Out of hundreds of millions of people in the country under discussion, there are thousands of killers every year. "Killer apes" is not a very strong effect (proportionally), and it's a fairly new effect (War is not new, but it's instructive just how hard the military has to work to change some of the young men and women they control into genuine killers), so I'd say: consider environmental factors.

Do the ultra-violent movies/ tv shows/ comic books/ games have an impact on the psyches of the young? How could anyone say "no" to that question? "Killers apes" are, overwhelmingly, made, not born.

10+ years later and Chris Rock's joke about young white boys being the most terrifying group in America still rings true.

Also, black males do not commit these types of acts everyday. That's irresponsible. Do they kill each other in a misguided conflict? Absolutely. The difference, although still wrong, is that they're is always a target (for the most part). you can't compare the two, honestly.

What is the significance of chimp war? It is important in what it shows us about cooperative violence, which usually erupts only as enlightened self-interest. Group aggression confers such a huge winning edge against single competitors that, once it entered the arms race of sexual selection, kin selection instantly forged it into the most seri­ous weapon in any male’s behavioral arsenal. No male on his own could ever compete and win against a martial system like that of wild chimpanzees.

Eerie parallels also exist between warfare by juvenile street gangs and warfare by chimps. First, gang homicide, though driven by the illegal drug trade (instead of by fruit trees and females), is far more often related to control and defense of territory than to drugs. Second, street gang death tolls are horrific. In the 1990s, U.S. juvenile gang killings have averaged 1,000 per year, and these killings are often the result of tit-for-tat retaliation. Third, as violent as gang members are, they commit few rapes. Instead, enough women are attracted to gang members to satisfy them. Fourth, homicides in individual gangs cycle in bursts and lulls that varied 660 percent in annual death tolls. Like chimp wars, gang wars run hot and cold.

It should be noted that male chimps from Mahale and Gombe (and likely Kibale as well) waged war on a neighboring community only when it, the “enemy,” was a lot smaller and weaker than their own community, containing half or fewer adult males. It is no overstatement to say that chimps are Machiavellian—or, to put it another way, politically devious and violent men are chimpanzee-like!

These studies of wild chimps tell us that solidarity in aggression among a community’s male kin is their standard strategy to reproduce and that this strategy has been around for a long time. How do we know? Despite their fierce and violent competition, male chimps are only 123 percent the weight of females, evidence that winning against other males no longer hinges on the more primitive orangutan or gorilla strategy of being a huge and formidable individual. Instead, winning depends on group size of male kin who cooperate as an army. Were this a recent evolutionary development, male chimps would be both big and cooperative.

Although chimps teach us what the law of the jungle really means, they also teach us what being social is all about. Sociability is for individual advantage. Within the chimps’ fusion-fission society, each ape’s decisions as to whether to socialize and with whom are based solely on how to best enhance his or her own reproductive success. Thus chimpanzee social structure—violent and otherwise—owes its form ultimately to each individual’s reproductive strategies and, by extension, to each one’s individual decisions. Warfare is simply the social version of combat.

Chimp social structure would be unique were it not for humans acting similarly. This is no coincidence. By most taxonomic criteria, chimps and humans are sibling species. Overall, chimp society is not only extremely sexist—with all adult males dominant over females—but also xenophobic to the extent of killing all alien males, many infants, and some old females who enter their territory. To some readers, my use of the word war may seem too strong to describe what male kin groups do. But systematic, protracted, deliberate, and cooperative brutal killings of every male in a neighboring community, plus genocidal and frequent cannibalistic murder of many of their offspring, followed by usurpation of the males’ mates and annexation of part or all of the losers’ territory, matches or exceeds the worst that humans do when they wage war.

Waiting for the conceptual link between the atrocity under discussion (disgruntled dude with automatic weapons fires randomly into movie audience, over-identifying with Heath Ledger's Joker) and "chimp war"...

CnU, I'm really sort of surprised you don't cite William B. Shockley more often, or, obviously, Charles Murray. Maybe I need to have a peek in the WARN archives. And where do you stand on David Duke's mission... ?

Waiting for the conceptual link between the atrocity under discussion (disgruntled dude with automatic weapons fires randomly into movie audience, over-identifying with Heath Ledger's Joker) and "chimp war".

William Luther Pierce would be your forerunner huckleberry fetching around for the killer-ape ignition switch.

However, there are several conversations that will likely not occur. It is unlikely that the aftermath of the Colorado shooting rampage will be a moment when we as a country reflect upon the relationship between masculinity and violence. There most certainly will not be a "beer summit" about how accused shooter James Holmes is one more entry in a long list of mass killers who are white, male, and young.

When viewed through the white racial frame, there is nothing in his deeds on last Friday night that reflects upon the behavior of white people, generally, or white men in particular. From this perspective, his dressing up as The Joker, and killing more than a dozen people, and wounding many more, are the actions of one sick person.

lol, the ethological roots of the spate of young male gun violence will not occur - mostly because egg-headed simpletons overly enamored of their own frilly rhetoric - have never considered that steadily escalating young male violence is a natural and expected outgrowth of steadily escalating economic pressure.

non-violent, peaceful protest is the cultivated anomalous response.

It's only a matter of time before the killer-ape ethology takes collective hold and prompts collective violent action.

the psychopath can serve as a catalyst to the collective eruption, and once that gets underway, serves as the journeyman maintainer of an escalated and sustainable level of collective violent action.

As folks have worked through many times before in the common "what if?" game of race in America, if James Holmes were black or brown this would be one more signal to the existence of a "pathological culture" among said group.

This incident, and the spate of precursor incidents over the past decade, along continuing high-levels of gang-related violence in the hood - are a clear indication of underlying pathology among young males in America. The highly organized elder psychopathocracy - which formerly worked to channel and check such young male violence - is no longer on the job anymore.

By contrast, in Mexico OTOH - the elder psychopathocracy is sufficently well organized that it's well down the path of building and operating its own competing deep state infrastructure sufficient to dig in for a protracted civil war with Mexico's incumbent silverback elites.

oh CD i must very much disagree. nothing is wrong with young white men. we don't need to ask what is. what we need to do is STOP asking what is wrong with blacks. because people at the root of it are just people. nothing is wrong with white people that caused this, just like nothing is wrong with blacks or muslims when members of those groups are the arbiters of violence.

although perhaps you were being sarcastic as in your white criminal pieces.

@freebonesAppreciating your attempt to ratchet down the racial dichotomies happening, but the point of the original post is that if this person were black the media would be coming up with pathological explanations, using him as a symbol of black men across America, rather than a disturbed individual. And I think the idea with the flipping of the script to ask what he represents about the pathology of white men is to see if this way of thinking (pathology of a race/cultural group) has anything to offer as far as understanding this tragedy when we decouple it from its cultural history of being used to categorize black men as inherently violent and criminal.

Although something is wrong with the young white men who gun down hordes of innocent bystanders (I would argue MORE than is wrong with the young black/brown/whatever gang members who are acting according to comprehensible economic and health incentives within their professional field), it probably has less to do with the single factor of their race than the bewildering array of specific problems that goes into producing an individual psychology, one of which is undoubtedly race.

But if the racist media is going to treat every black killer as an example of the "pathology" of black men, when again he is probably a better example of how humans respond to economic, health, and social incentives, let's see if treating a typical white criminal as an example of the pathology of whites gives us any interesting ideas to run with. Hence the question posed in the post. And my attempt to respond, positing a racial frame for the killer's actions ("I'm not a good enough white man, I need to establish my superiority with violence").

@ a white guyI hope you weren't responding to me with those comments about beating children and blacks committing "just as many" mass killings as whites, because (a) beating children normalizes violence in that child's psychology as a problem-solving strategy throughout their lives (not to mention fosters a sense of personal helplessness and inferiority, all of which place people of any race, class, and everything else at a higher risk for violent activity later in life) and (b) I never said only whites commit mass killings, but that white men in the US tend to commit this particular type of mass killing. People of color commit mass killings all the time, mostly in Africa, Asia, and South America as a technique of political control. In the US the killings done by people of color tend to be the across-the-board crimes of passion everyone commits or targeted acts of violence based on the professional needs of a violent criminal organization (indeed often badly and broadly targeted, but that's more a question of resources than psychology, ie it being easier, cheaper, and faster to spray a truck with automatic weapon fire and endanger innocents than it is to stealthily and specifically kill the single person targeted). Psychologically-motivated mass killings like the Aurora shootings are almost entirely the province of white men. Almost. After all, the Virginia Tech shooter wasn't white, to pick one mostly at random. Though that does kind of expose the lie that is any racial frame in the first place, as race can never be more than a single factor in the multifaceted process of individual decision-making.

Of course RACE is rhe issue with acts of domestic terrorism in America..Clearly MALES not FEMALES are the most lethal gender in America and Clealry WHITE MALES are the lost lethal and criminal aggregate in our nation from incest to child pron sites to workplace killings to white collar crimes, spousal abuse, and now this crowd kill syndrome all 95% male aand white males as the trigger..

I propose our Surgeon General conduct a national medical inquiry on the specifics of MALE violence in both urban and class related venues..

I then propose a complete moratorium of gun sales under the umbrella of medical public policy to pronibit the sales of guns to all males in these venues with a added focus on "white males".

Our Surgeon General needs to publish an index on lethal and violence criminal suspects which all of us can employ 24/7..

Our Surgeon General under a martial law medical emergency can the create a state wide mental health force which can the have arrest rights to apprehend and place into custody people that suffered from these pathologies as defined by the SG's national medical inquiry task force..

Let's start now and write to congress to begi this national medical inquiry and process..

Clearly the profile of a crowd serial killer is the male and the white male leads the index..

It therefore follows that any proposed solution must incorporate the white male in the equation.

I like the medical template offered up by one of the posters it will not violate any constitutional related rights and under a public policy model it will be easy to model after a medical threat to the public safety .

My concern is will white males in the ruling class tolerate this medical model which would limit their white privilege and master of the universe persona ??

"lol, stick with comic books and racism chasing steven, ethology may just not be for you..."

Fine, CnU... but... how about that clarification, after all? Because it looks to me that your "chimp war" insert was a case of someone with not much to add to the actual conversation defaulting to copy-n-paste in lieu of a cogently-argued position.

Because the "chimp war" paradigm is demonstrably unrelated to the disgruntled-loner-with-a-gun-inflicting-random-carnage meme.

Not trying to embarrass you or anything. Just hoping for an interesting conversation.

"But if the racist media is going to treat every black killer as an example of the "pathology" of black men, when again he is probably a better example of how humans respond to economic, health, and social incentives, let's see if treating a typical white criminal as an example of the pathology of whites gives us any interesting ideas to run with. Hence the question posed in the post."

It's interesting (frustrating) how easy it seems to be to misinterpret this simple thought-experiment. The defensive/hostile reaction to it is a real QED moment.

Right. And the blog post you now link to relates to the "chimp war" article-excerpt you copy-n-pasted, before, exactly how? (well at least you linked instead of pasting, this time).

Here's the essential argument of the "chimp war" thing you posted:

"What is the significance of chimp war? It is important in what it shows us about cooperative violence, which usually erupts only as enlightened self-interest. Group aggression confers such a huge winning edge against single competitors that, once it entered the arms race of sexual selection, kin selection instantly forged it into the most seri­ous weapon in any male’s behavioral arsenal."

Operative phrase: "cooperative violence". Now: can you please either connect that to the lone gunman under discussion or admit you were just kinda sorta bluffing... while borrowing a better rhetorician's crypto-racist insinuations?

Failing that: keep tossing non sequiturs at the wall until one of them sticks, CnU!

"The white man, that landed here; He came with two great weapons. One is the bible and the other was the gun. If he didn't humble you with the bible, he'd crumble you with the gun. And he's still praising the lord and passing the ammunition." - Lewis H. Michaux

Hello CD, White male privilege is nothing new in this country. Therefore, it should be no surprise that this deranged young man did what he did in Aurora. In fact, his behavior is consistent with a group of people who believe that they have an inherent right to destroy other human beings at a time of their choosing. It is also in line with a culture that continues to marginalize and denigrate others who doesn’t fit their own phenotypic makeup. In sum, surely we are dealing with a sick group of people. –Black Sage

Hey guys - im sure this is just a fake, but some people are saying that this youtube video was put up by JAMES HOLMES - the crazy wanna-be Joker Denver cinema Shooter. The video is 3 weeks old, so it's not some newbie wanna be fake.... It's pretty wierd, i'll give it that much - it seems to be trying to explain why he's so angry, and how maybe the shooting was a way for him to fight the actual source of his rage... doesn't make much sense to me, but it's.... interesting. Here's the link anywayhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdp0QsqYbuY

The point of the original article is not that the shooter did what he did *because* he's white (though it can be argued that *how* he did it may be tied to cultural factors); the point is that media responds to this perp differently, and in much the same way you do, because of his race: as an *individual*.

The media reaction to a Black human's violence tends to insinuate that the violence is a result of a flaw in Black culture (or even genetics); the Black perp becomes the stand-in (or ambassador) for All Blacks. The White Perp is usually treated as an aberration... that's the "privilege" the original article refers to.

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